Faith as Resistance: Everyday Practices of the Ahmadiyya Community in Malabar, Kerala, India

Faith as Resistance: Everyday Practices of the Ahmadiyya Community in Malabar, Kerala, India This article examines how the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Malabar, Kerala, navigates religious exclusion through everyday faith-based practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork comprising 60 biographical interviews and sustained participant observation across five districts, the study analyzes how practices of hubb (love), dua (prayer), and sabr (patience) function not merely as acts of piety but as deliberate mechanisms of resistance against marginalization by dominant Muslim groups. Employing James C. Scott's framework of everyday resistance, supplemented by insights from Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood, the paper demonstrates how these faith practices constitute subtle yet consequential forms of dissent embedded in ordinary life. In Kerala, Ahmadis face exclusion through social distancing, verbal disparagement, and erasure from Muslim communal life, rather than the overt legal persecution found in countries such as Pakistan. Against this backdrop, the community mobilizes hubb through humanitarian service and care, extending compassion even toward those who exclude them. Dua is enacted as complete reliance on divine intervention, with Ahmadis praying for those who cause them harm rather than retaliating. Sabr is cultivated as patience, life discipline, and moral endurance, transmitted deliberately across generations as a habitus of steadfast non-confrontation. The study advances two key analytical contributions. First, it argues that these practices are not expressions of passivity or quietism but strategic, collectively disciplined modes of survival that preserve dignity, sustain communal cohesion, and build informal networks of social legitimacy within an unequal intra-Muslim landscape. Second, and more centrally, it conceptualizes faith-based resistance as a pathway through which Ahmadis assert moral superiority over dominant Muslims, transforming suffering into a claim of spiritual authenticity. By internalizing hardship without retaliation, Ahmadis position themselves as embodying true Islamic ethics, inverting the symbolic hierarchies through which they are delegitimized. The findings challenge dominant scholarly assumptions that equate resistance with confrontation or institutional mobilization, revealing instead how marginalized religious communities sustain agency through ethical discipline and everyday practice. The study thus contributes to broader discussions of minority religious resilience, intra-Muslim power dynamics, and the relationship between faith, identity, and resistance in South Asia's pluralist contexts.